Beneath the cliffs of the Causeway Coast, a handful of sea caves carry their own ghost stories — and, in one case, a genuinely surprising visit from a real scientific pioneer.
Mermaid’s Cave, Dunluce Castle
Beneath Dunluce Castle sits a cave over 60 feet high and more than 300 feet long, long associated with one of the coast’s more poignant ghost stories. Maeve Roe, said to be the only daughter of Lord McQuillan of Dunluce, was imprisoned in the castle’s north-eastern tower — still known today as the Roe Tower — after refusing an arranged marriage. Her true love, Reginald O’Cahan, attempted a storm-night rescue by boat through the cave below, rowing for Portrush, but the boat was dashed against the White Rocks. Lord McQuillan reportedly witnessed the tragedy from the castle walls; Maeve Roe’s body was never found, and local tradition holds her ghost still sweeps her old prison tower each night, watched by no living witness.
The Ghost of Cathedral Cave
At the White Rocks, Cathedral Cave — around 100 yards deep and at least 30 feet high at its entrance — carries a quieter legend, first recorded in an 1857 magazine: a musician named Jackson, caught by the rising tide inside the cave, is said to have become “lost forever to sight, but not to hearing,” his ghostly music supposedly still audible far inland on the right night.
A real scientific visit
Cathedral Cave’s more remarkable story is entirely true. In 1896, the French scientific journal La Nature published an etching from a paper by Édouard-Alfred Martel — widely considered the father of modern speleology, the scientific study of caves — depicting two great rock columns joined by a natural arch deep inside the cave, mislabelled at the time as a different cave further along the coast. A separate period postcard from around 1900 shows the same “Great Column” still standing; a photograph credited to Robert Welch, a genuinely significant Belfast photographer of the era, confirms it intact around the same date. Comparing these images against the cave today reveals the column has since collapsed entirely into rubble — meaning Cathedral Cave, a short walk from the Giant’s Causeway visitor centre, was quietly visited and documented by one of the founding figures of an entire scientific discipline, over a century before most visitors ever hear its name.